Parenting Memoir

At 15, I killed someone. This was just one of many secrets that my brain hid from me. For most of my life, I had barely any memories of my childhood. Except for a few snippets, I lived in the dark. It wasn’t until I turned 36 that my world began to unravel. Slow at first, and then suddenly, all at once, long-buried memories that had been concealed in the depths of my mind for survival now surfaced, shooting to the forefront of my mind.

A desperate mother must grapple with impossible choices as her young son becomes too dangerous to live at home, but is only growing bigger, stronger, and more violent while in treatment. When Keri and her husband adopt Devon, he has concerning behaviors, but she's confident all he needs is the love of a forever family.

Searching for answers everywhere has led you to believe your beloved child might have schizophrenia. You can only find horror stories on the illness, that is when you’re able to understand the lengthy and confusing medical terminology at all.

Solitude is the inspirational core for many writers, artists, and thinkers. Alone with our thoughts, we can make discoveries that matter not only to us but to others. To be solitary is not only to draw sustenance from being alone, but to know that our ultimate responsibility is not only to our partner or our own offspring, but to a larger community. Fenton Johnson's lyrical prose and searching sensibility explores what it means to choose to be solitary and celebrates the notion that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling.

USA Today and New York Times best-selling author Karen Kingsbury is beloved across the nation for her moving tales of faith and redemption. In A Treasury of Miracles for Women, Kingsbury recounts uplifting true stories in which mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters are touched by God’s presence in extraordinary ways.

At age four, Diana manages her family's banking, grocery shops alone, and befriends the town drunk. Her father is too busy chasing skirts and throwing fits to notice what she does. And her mom is too mentally absent to properly parent. While Diana's narcissistic dad terrorizes and exploits her, she works harder to please him. Estill, an award-winning humor author, shares an honest and comedic look at her dysfunctional childhood. As an adult, she struggles to reclaim her power while caring for her dementia-impaired dad.

In the 1990s, Steve Farrell cofounded and led two high-growth technology companies based in Silicon Valley that were featured in the INC500 and spanned the United States and Europe. A New Universal Dream is the inspiring story of Steve's journey from the pursuit of wealth and traditional ideas of success toward a more fulfilling life of caring and service to others and to humanity. It's also the story of the potential each of us has for profound change.

Sean Szeps had wanted to be a mum since the age of four when he fell in love with Mrs Potts, the motherly teapot in Beauty and the Beast. But there was just one problem – he was not, in fact, a woman. But when he was swept off his feet by a handsome Australian man in New York City, Szeps's dreams of marriage and parenthood seemed – for the very first time – within reach. There were just a few little things still standing in his way – outdated marriage laws, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a healthy dose of internalised homophobia.

Was it My Fault? is intended to offer solace and guidance to those ensnared in toxic relationships, dispelling the notion that abuse is solely physical. Inspiring self-discovery, healing, and empowerment, Alana offers a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a rallying cry for survivors to reclaim their narrative—urging them not just to survive, but to thrive.

Searching for Mom is a “disarmingly honest” mother-daughter story. Sara Easterly spent a lifetime looking for the perfect mother. As an adoptee, she had difficulties attaching to her mother, struggled with her faith, lived the effects of intergenerational wounding, and felt an inherent sense of being unwanted that drove her to perfectionism, suicidal ideations, and fantasy mothers.

Constance was always a California dreamer, though her circumstances gave her no right to be. She grew up in 1980s San Diego as the fourth of nine children. The crowded two-bedroom apartment where she spent her childhood was far from a safe cocoon that could nurture her dreams into reality. Constance began caring for her siblings while she was still a child herself, stepping in for her overwhelmed mother and her often absent, unpredictable father.

Baby Rosemary - born to an Italian teen and a married black man in Detroit in 1946 - is adopted from an agency by a black couple in Saginaw, Michigan. The adoptive mother's abuse instills in the girl, whom they name Marylin Elnora, ambition to achieve great things on her own. At age 19, Marylin sparks a racial and religious scandal by marrying former Roman Catholic priest Thomas Lee Atkins, who is white and 25 years older.

While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Diaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism.

When Heather Havrilesky was a kid in the seventies, it seemed there were only disaster movies. Burning towers, devouring earthquakes, careening airliners, alien pod invasions. To be prepared, she and her siblings fabricated elaborate plans to escape any and every emergency. But what began merely as a childhood game grew into a way of life where something shocking lurked around every corner.

Lene Fogelberg is dying - she is sure of it - but no doctor in Sweden, her home country, believes her. Love stories enfold her, with her husband, her two precious daughters, her enchanting surroundings, but the question she has carried in her heart since childhood - will I die young? - is threatening all she holds dear, even her sanity. When her young family moves to the US, an answer, a diagnosis, is finally found: She is in the last stages of a fatal congenital heart disease. But is it too late?

Zoe Zolbrod remained silent about her early childhood molestation for nearly a decade. When she finally decided to tell, she wasn't sure what to expect or what to say. Through a series of experiences - Zolbrod hitchhikes with a boyfriend from one coast to another, hangs out in a strip club in Philadelphia, meets and marries her husband, and gives birth to her children - she traces the development of her sexuality, her relationships with men, and the cultivation of her motherhood in the shadow of her childhood sexual abuse.

With the birth of her first child, Laura Jean Baker found herself electrified by oxytocin, the "love drug" - the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression. Again and again over the next eight years, Baker finds herself craving the intense highs of childbearing - cravings that, she realizes, align her much more closely with her public defender husband's desperate, drug-addled clients than with their middle-class peers. As Ryan's roster of defendants increases, so too does their family - nearly to the point of collapse.

Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she's sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she left behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each subsequent reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again.

One phone call. That's all it took to change Stephanie Wittels Wachs's life forever.... Her younger brother Harris, a star in the comedy world known for his work on shows like Parks and Recreation, had died of a heroin overdose. How do you make sense of such a tragic end to a life of so much hilarious brilliance? In beautiful, unsentimental, and surprisingly funny prose, Stephanie Wittels Wachs alternates between her brother's struggle with addiction, which she learned about three days before her wedding, and the first year after his death, in all its emotional devastation.

In this powerful and personal memoir, Annelise Duval shares her journey of survival, courage, and healing after escaping the devastating grip of domestic violence. Through raw, honest storytelling, Annelise provides insight into the emotional, physical, and psychological toll of abuse, while offering a message of hope for those still trapped in the cycle.